Tags
I recently came across a great thread in Quora about the usage of the word “yes” in various languages. The thread is concerned with explaining why romance languages use almost the same word for “yes” (si [Spanish, Italian] and sim [Portuguese]) when there is no word for “yes” in Latin.
This last bit was news to me. It’s almost as strange as the lack of the verb “be” from Russian. A language without “yes”? How can that work?
And yet, it’s true. While English (and Greek) speakers use “yes” without a second thought, it turns out that many languages have no need for it.
Romance Languages and “yes”
Dante actually classified medieval Romance languages according to their different words for “yes”:
- “si” was found in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese – the major “southern” Romance languages. However, Portuguese doesn’t even use “sim” very often. It still clings to the Latin tradition of repeating verbs to say “yes”. Você está bem? (Are you alright?) Estou (I am)
- “oc” was found in the land of the troubadours – the south of France, stretching from the northern border with Spain to the northern border with Italy (the so-called “langue-d’oc”). Provençals, Occitans and Catalans used “hoc est!”, “so it is!” or simply hoc, “for this reason”. This observation gave those languages the name langues de oc – and the whole Southern France the name Languedoc – “language of oc” .
- The Northern French and Lowlanders said “hoc ille” or ‘’hoc illud’’ as affirmative, “this is it”, which shortened to oil, modern French oui. “Oui” or the older “oïl” was found in the many dialects of central and northern Francia (the so-called “langue d’oïl”).
Now “si” comes from Latin “sic” (“thus”) and “oc” and “oui” comes from Latin “hoc” (“this”) – although “oui” or earlier “oïl”is actually from a longer phrase “hoc illi”. The point is, all these words or phrases are affirming something: “this way”, “this thing”.
Southern, central, and northern Romance languages in the west use different words – and Romanian in the east is different again. This suggests a loose uniformity of practice in Latin times. After all, Latin evolved while spoken in different parts of the world. Perhaps common people did use “sic” and “hoc” in daily speech, without it being recorded – rather like we use “yep” and “nope” in colloquial speech but write in a more formal style.
Whatever the reason, Romance languages went their separate ways to some extent – they only use “sic” based terms for “yes” in the southern languages.
So What Did the Latins Do?
The Romans usually answered by replying with the original verb.
“Would you like to come to circus today?”
“I would like to”.
How About The Rest of the World?
How common is that Latin construct? Turns out, surprisingly so!
Hebrew
The Modern Hebrew word for yes is ken (כן) which is the Biblical Hebrew for “[It is] thus”. That’s why the phrase “lo ken” ( לא כן) is allowed. It literally means “no yes”, but it actually means “it isn’t so”.
Romanian
Romanian has the same construct, but with the opposite meaning: Romanian uses the Slavic word “da” for yes and, besides the regular negative answer “nu”, it also has another somewhat archaic/regional/rarely used negation “ba”, both meaning no. However, if one says “ba da” (no yes), it is actually a stronger affirmation, typically used if the question assumed that the answer will be negative, when in fact it is positive. This is exactly the same usage as “si” in French (as opposed to merely “oui”). In English, it might be something like “oh, but yes!”.
Hiberno-English
Speakers of Hiberno-English (Irish English) often use the Latin construction, it being one of several grammatical borrowings from Irish. They don’t repeat the whole construction but rather the modal verb on its own: “Will you be in the pub tonight?” “I will [not].” “Do you want another cup of tea?” “I do [not]”.
Chinese
Chinese follows the same construct as well, although Chinese has evolved to have a “yes” nowadays. However, “yes” in Chinese is the verb for is or “to be”, usually with an extra character to make it sound friendlier:
是的
是 is “to be” or “is”
Questions are often phrased «verb / not-verb» and the reply is phrased as «verb» or «not-verb».
Brazilian Portuguese
Brazilian Portuguese has three options, listed here in order of popularity:
- Reply with the same verb:
“Do you want this?” “I want.”
Você quer isto? Quero.
2. The verb to be (we have two, by the way. This is for permanent to be. We have a transient variation):
“Did he crash the car?” “Is”.
Ele bateu o carro? É.
3. And the word yes.
“Is it so?” “Yes.”
É isso mesmo? Sim.
However, sim is usually only used for emphasis and would be considered rude (or, at least, odd) to use it in another context.
French
Finally, the word “si” is used to say “yes” in French, but only in a specific context.
It is when someone assumes that you will agree to their negation but you actually don’t. So, instead of saying “oui” or “non,” you say “si” to convey that, on the contrary, you are positive about the thing the guy assumed you were negative about.
Examples :
- Q : Tu n’aimes pas les croissants? A : Si je les aime! (You don’t like croissants? Yes, I do like them!)
- Q : Tu ne fais jamais le ménage?! A : Si je le fais! (You never do the housework ?! Yes, I do it!)
- Q : Tu ne comprends pas? A : Si je comprends (You don’t understand ? Yes, I understand.)
In each of these cases, had you answered with the traditional “oui,” it would have meant that you agree with the question/affirmation. Answering by “non” + an explanation is possible, but it is confusing on some level to use a negation to counter a negation.
So “si” is the word most French will use in that context.
Yes vs. Yes
Are you confused yet? If not, maybe this will help: a surprising number of languages that do use “yes” have not one but two versions. Usually, one of them is used as a simple “yes” and the other as “yes, indeed” (i.e. with added emphasis).
However, Swedish has ja and jo. Ja is an affirmative on a positive asked question. Jo is when you complain on a negatively asked question:
Is it raining. Yes it is. Regnar det? Ja (det gör det) (or No it isn’t. Nej (det gör det inte).)
It is not raining. You’re right. Nej (det gör det inte). Or You’re wrong. Jo (det gör det visst).
English used to have two words for yes also: “yes,” and “ya.” Ya being when the negative was assumed but it actually the positive was true, and yes being when the positive was assumed and the answer was positive (incidentally, it also had to versions of no: no and nay, nay being when the positive was assumed but the negative was the answer. Nay has survived today in legislative assemblies.)
Furthermore, “aye” is still used today in Scotland. A single aye is a simple “yes,” while a double aye means “I understand and will comply” (usually used in nautical parlance).
The Origins of Yes
If you’re wondering, the English word “yes” is of Germanic origin. It is thought to have come from a similar sort of root to “si”: “yes” is an evolution of Old English “gea + si” meaning “so be it”, while similarly “si” comes from “sic est” also meaning “so be it”.
The concept of a singleton affirmative word simply didn’t exist in either language tree from their earliest days – Latin OR Germanic, even though it did exist in Greek (“Ναι.”). It’s a word that evolved out of necessity in both trees, and from similar phrases.
But those singleton affirmative words are similar because they are simply shortenings of the same root multi-word affirmative phrases in their respective trees.
In other words, the concept of an affirmative reply pre-dated the development of the singleton version of it!
So… yes. Turns out, saying yes is no picnic! Now, I wonder where that expression comes from…
tidalscribe said:
I certainly didn’t know of languages that don’t have yes and it seems that the alternatives could be better. Yes is not very expressive! I have noticed how No in many languages start with N. Perhaps it’s a sound that comes naturally with negative thoughts.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
That would be the subject for a different post 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Priscilla Bettis said:
That was fascinating, especially the French si. I spent a semester in China when I was younger. I thought their positive-response construction made so much sense, hard to misunderstand someone. I actually didn’t learn enough of the language to know that there was a modern “yes” now in Chinese (or maybe that’s a very recent addition).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Thanks for sharing that, Priscilla! No idea just when the “yes” was added in Chinese. If it was in the past few decades, it’d be particularly fascinating, as it’d mean we’re watching a language evolve in real-time.
LikeLike
beetleypete said:
Good to know about the Roman construction, which was new to me.
As a young man in London, I noticed the way that Irish people spoke like your example, and thought it very archaic. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Very archaic, indeed! Thank you, Pete 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sumita Tah said:
This was pretty informative.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
And unexpected!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sumita Tah said:
😊
LikeLiked by 1 person
Gabi Coatsworth said:
Great post. I love etymology 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Same here! It feels like unraveling a mystery 😀
LikeLiked by 1 person
Marina Costa said:
Reblogged this on Marina Costa and commented:
As always, Nicholas’ posts are very interesting. Thank you!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Don Massenzio said:
Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out this interesting post from Nicholas Rossis’ blog with How Hard is it to Say Yes?
LikeLike
OIKOS™-Publishing said:
Thak you for another wonderful posting, of great interest, Nicholas! Never thought about this before. But its true, one has to know. Michael
LikeLike
wilfredbooks said:
In another life, I think I might have liked to be a philologist, so I read this with great interest, Nicholas. 😀 I tried learning Irish some years ago [it’s tricky!] and I think I’m right in saying that it also doesn’t have a word for ‘yes’: I believe they say ‘tá’, which simply means ‘is’. Cheers, Jon.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Thank you for adding that, Jon! Fascinating stuff, indeed!
LikeLiked by 1 person
V.M.Sang said:
Absolutely fascinating, Nicholas. Thanks for the insight.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
So glad you enjoyed the post! Thank you 🙂
LikeLike
DebyFredericks said:
How interesting. But I admit from your header I thought it would be about saying yes when people ask you to do something you don’t want to do, don’t have time for, etc.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Oh! Sorry, I thought it was a nice title 🙂
LikeLike
DebyFredericks said:
It was, though.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Damyanti Biswas said:
Great post. Very informative… I did not know about majority of these.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Same here! Thank you, Damyanti 🙂
LikeLike
Jay said:
Brazilian person here. True, we rarely use the word ‘yes’ as a simple answer. I do use a lot of ‘sim, claro’ (yes, of course) on customer service, but it’s not really very common. Using the verb contained in the question is definitely the most common way to affirm what’s being asked.
Great post! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Thank you for sharing that, Jay!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wendy Janes said:
Absolutely fascinating. Thanks for this, Nicholas.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nicholas C. Rossis said:
So glad you enjoyed it, Wendy! Thank you 🙂
LikeLike